the war remains of keith douglas and hughes ‘The Sea Bird’ unfurls itself as one long sentence, which begins,Walkingalong beside the beach
where the Mediterranean turns in sleep
under the cliffs’ demiarch
through a curtain of thought I see
a dead bird and a live bird
the dead eyeless, but with a bright eye
the live bird discovered me
and stepped from a black rock into the air—
Iturnfromthedeadbirdtowatchhimfly...^53The poet describes two birds he catches sight of on the Mediterranean coast, one
living and one dead. Douglas’s title plays on the homophonic ‘see’ and ‘sea’, setting
up the baffling matter of the sight of the sea birds. The ‘eyeless’ dead bird seems
to share the ‘bright eye’ of the live bird, so much so that when we read the line
‘I turn from the dead bird to watch him fly’ we are not certain which bird is
actually ascendant. The continuity from tercet to tercet is achieved by radical use
of enjambment, so that many lines are pivotal, and frequently a clause might refer
to the syntactical unit that precedes or follows it: the ‘bright eye’ that arrests the
poet’s eye, for example, could refer to ‘the dead eyeless’ bird or the live one. The
enjambment continues until the bird steps into the air, and the dash that follows
appears to represent its movement off the edge of the line itself. The bird rises,
until in the poem’s conclusion the live bird ‘escapes the eye, or is a ghost|and in a
moment has come down,|crept into the dead bird, ceased to exist’. Whether this
is the eye of man or bird (and which bird?), we are again confounded. Yet the live
bird in its mobility is less palpable than the dead one on the beach, being ‘a ghost’.
That the poem achieves its most intense effects from the figuration of its lines is
dramatized in an extended extemporaneous response to the poem by Hughes in a
1988 letter to William Scammell:
I see the impalpably painfully real thing, in ‘The Sea Bird’, as the real identity of the live
bird and the dead one—an image of his sense of his own death having somehow already
happened, of himself alive being already in his own death and corpse in some abnormal
degree of awareness. In ‘The Sea Bird’ so many of the lines superimpose the two
a dead bird and a live birdnot differentiated in place
the dead eyeless, but with a bright eye(the empty eyesocket has a bright eye in it)
the live bird discovered me(^53) Douglas, ‘The Sea Bird’, inComplete Poems, 86.